In this paper we deal with the theory of Hilbert–Schmidt operators, when the usual choice of orthonormal basis, on the associated Hilbert spaces, is replaced by frames. We More precisely, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for an operator to be Hilbert–Schmidt, based on its action on the elements of a frame (i.e. an operator T is 
if and only if the sum of the squared norms of T applied on the elements of the frame is finite). Also, we construct Bessel sequences, frames and Riesz bases of 
operators using tensor products of the same sequences in the associated Hilbert spaces. We state how the 
inner product of an arbitrary operator and a rank one operator can be calculated in an efficient way; and we use this result to provide a numerically efficient algorithm to find the best approximation, in the Hilbert–Schmidt sense, of an arbitrary matrix, by a so-called frame multiplier (i.e. an operator which act diagonally on the frame analysis coefficients). Finally, we give some simple examples using Gabor and wavelet frames, introducing in this way wavelet multipliers.
